Robert J. Lang has been an avid student of origami for nearly 50 years and is now recognized as one of the world's leading masters of the art, with over 700 designs cataloged and diagrammed. He is noted for designs of great detail and realism, and includes in his repertoire some of the most complex origami designs ever created. His work combines aspects of the Western school of mathematical origami design with the Eastern emphasis upon line and form to yield models that are at once distinctive, elegant, and challenging to fold. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world, including Paris, Los Angeles, the Kaga Museum of Origami in Japan, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Dr. Lang was the first Westerner invited to address the Nippon (Japan) Origami Association's annual meeting (in 1992) and has been an invited guest at international origami conventions around the world. Dr. Lang is one of the pioneers of the cross-disciplinary marriage of origami with mathematics and has presented numerous refereed technical papers on origami mathematics at mathematical and computer science professional meetings; he also organized the Fourth International Meeting on Origami in Science, Mathematics, and Education, held at Caltech in 2006. He has consulted on applications of origami to engineering problems including medical devices, air-bag design, and expandable space telescopes. He is the author or co-author of seventeen books and numerous articles on origami and is a regular lecturer on the connections between origami, mathematics, science, and technology. He received Caltech's Distinguished Alumni award, in 2009 and was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013.